Dan Parks of Laguna Beach is field testing Google Glass, eyewear with the newest technology. Parks describes himself as just a "kid playing with toys." ROSE PALMISANO, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Dressed in a short-sleeve shirt with long dirty blonde hair, 51-year-old Dan Parks exudes a certain vibe – call it The Dude goes to Laguna. Then he reaches into a pouch filled with tech gadgets and delicately pulls out his latest toy.

Parks slips the $1,600 Google Glass specs over his ears and moves a small screen in front of his right eye. He tilts his head up and down.

"OK Glass, take a picture," says Parks, and Google's newest consumer gadget takes a photo just as he sees it – in this case, a picture of a reporter staring at him. A few minutes later, he says "OK Glass, let's make a video call," and Glass initiates a video call with the reporter's iPhone. Directly in front of Parks' right eye, he sees footage streaming from the camera of the iPhone. The iPhone, in turn, shows what Parks sees.

This is the kind of capability that gets Parks' gears turning for how his Dana Point corporate event and planning business could use Glass: He could give a client on another continent a complete tour of a venue. Or, he could be the client's eyes, ears and legs on the ground.

"We're going to try to develop as many applications as we can to implement them in our meeting and event business," Parks said of Corporate Planners Unlimited, his family's 15-employee business. "You're talking about being able to save a significant amount of money."

For now, though, Parks is just a "kid playing with toys." The Laguna Beach resident is one of the Google Glass Explorers, roughly 10,000 software developers and early adopters who have been selected by the company to test out its specialized eyewear. In addition to the event planning, Parks also plans to use it for interviews of boxing and mixed martial arts stars before and after matches.

Google hasn't said how many of the Explorers are in Orange County. But online videos and photos already are popping up from people who are testing them out here.

Unlike some bars and casinos that have pre-emptively banned the gadget, Disneyland said it has no rules against Google Glass in the parks. Sure enough, there are videos on YouTube showing what the entire Radiator Springs Racers and California Screamin' rides look like through the Glass lens. It's not really a cellphone video, more like an eye-level view captured forever of an individual moment someone experienced.

The jury is still out on whether Google Glass is going to become the next iPhone, whose impact can be seen anywhere someone is hunched over, like a chimp, tapping away on a touch-screen gadget – or another Segway, the stand-up scooter that debuted to great fanfare in 2001, only to become a niche product.

If there's one person worth asking, Parks might be it. He owns all of the above.

Parks paid someone to stand in line for the first iPhone. He built out a meeting space in the virtual world of Second Life, hoping to use it for the family's corporate planning business (it's still there in case Second Life ever gets easier to use and more popular). And then there's the Segway, which the Parks family bought more than a decade ago because it can navigate large meeting venues in no time. He loves it, and it's a relief to his wife, who has osteoporosis.

Parks picked up his set of Glass on June 22 at Google's offices in Venice. He drank in Google's eye-catching offices – the giant art installation of a pair of binoculars and the futuristic egg-shaped chairs hanging outside – and was assigned a handler, who spent 30 minutes showing him how to use the device.

He wore Glass on the drive home, trying to ascertain how distracting it could be. (Less so than typing on a touch screen while driving, he decided, his eyes – mostly – on the road and hands never off the steering wheel.) At a stop light, he got the first of many double-takes from another driver.

Parks tries to find the right analogy for what it feels like to wear Google Glass in public. Perhaps like being a very pretty woman who gets a lot of looks? Or a celebrity? A driver passing by the Register headquarters honked as Parks gave a demonstration. A man waiting in the lobby couldn't look away.

"They're mentally telling you, 'You've got Google Glasses, don't you?' " he says. In such cases, he usually introduces himself and takes the chance to explain what's going on. It's a recognition that, unlike the smartphone, Glass is still new and interesting but also entails a certain public intrusiveness.

"I don't want anybody to ever think I'm the creepy guy," he says.

So far, he hasn't encountered anyone like the person who heckled him when he rode his Segway out to pick up the mail: "Hey lazy, you don't know how to walk?"

To the contrary, his wife, Sherry, and 16-year-old daughter Brittany now want Glass for themselves. That will mean the three of them have to face the challenge of integrating Google with their vast ecosystem of Apple tablets, phones and computers.

The eyewear needs the Internet and uses a smartphone as a relay for much of its functionality. On a Google-backed Android phone, all the functionality is there. Not all of that translates as yet to an iPhone; text messages don't forward to the eyewear yet, for instance, and neither do directions. However, apps are being developed (developers were the first to get access to Glass) to expand its capabilities.

"I think we'll see a lot of changes to it," Parks said.

His daughter agreed.

"Google Glass is going to evolve in the future," Brittany said. "The Segway was cool, but you couldn't really improve on it. With Google Glass, the possibilities are endless."

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